I Found It! At Last!!

Oh, please, please, please, click on this link:
http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm

It’s not dangerous, obscene, violent, or anything else. Just funny.

File Sharing

Every morning as I drive my kids to school, the traffic jam reports on the radio take almost as long as the journey from our house to the school.

Now I should add that the school is only a few kilometres away, but still: a few minutes are an eternity in radio terms – trust me, I used to work for the radio and have had to do entire news bulletins covering all the latest world news in two minutes.

As if to intentionally add insult to injury, they have recently started adding the total amount of tailbacks, or “files” as they are known in Flemish. “There are 100 kilometres of ‘files’ today… there are 150 kilometres of ‘files’ in our country right now…”

I didn’t even know that you could find 150 kilometres of road in Belgium. Well, sort of. But I looked it up on Google Earth. You could line up the entire morning tailbacks almost anywhere in the country and find them reaching straight through the country – and back, in some cases. We’re talking ‘files’ of a kind which – if you could move them – could theoretically start in Holland and not end until well into France.

Talk about file sharing.

This morning, the sum of the tailbacks was 180 kilometres. Yesterday it was 185.

And on and on it goes. Listening to the chanting of the same points of reference every day makes you understand that something is seriously wrong. “Between Stroombeek and Wemmel, between Waterloo and Tervuren, at Groot-Bijgaarden…”

In fact, it would probably be easier to have the traffic report highlight the roads that are not congested, and just assume that all the others are.

Selling Belgium By The Euro

As those of you who read the comments on this blog have already noticed, the man who tried to sell Belgium on eBay has a new listing up: Get a Belgian citizenship for EUR 25.

“The perfect Christmas gift”, writes Gerrit Six, journalist and now also officially prankster, as he offers buyers the chance to enjoy, amongst otgher things, “speculoos, Belgian fries, tax evasion, hilarious elections” and “never winning the Eurovision Songcontest”, the latter sadly proving that he has already forgotten Sandra Kim, but that’s beside the point. Other benefits of course include “national debt (300 billion Euro)”, and, “for those who enrole before Christmas an extra bonus: THE WORLD RECORD RUINING THE COUNTRY WITHOUT GOVERNMENT”, he writes.

He could have added “the largest percentage of a country’s surface occupied by congested roads”, but I’ll elaborate on that in the next blog post instead.

Full link to Gerrit Six’s latest offer: http://cgi.benl.ebay.be/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200178129569&ssPageName=ADME:L:LCA:BE:1123

Shout, Shout

Can someone please tell me what in the name of peace people think they will achieve by demonstrating outside the EU buildings in Brussels about this or that.

Every single time you arrive at the Schuman roundabout in eastern Brussels, between the Commission’s four-armed fatso building, the Berlaymonster, and the Council’s even fatter, pink behemoth Justus Lipsius – the open space between the two is invariably filled with some group or another, demonstrating against something or another. Today, the Ministers of Agriclture convene in the Council colossus, debating the future of the Common Agriculture Policy, so there was a group of farmers ranting outside, shock horror and all that.

But their war cries were barely loud enough to be audible over the traffic noise. At the distance of some 20-30 metres, where I passd them on my way from the Metro station to the council building, I could not hear a word of what they were chanting over the megaphone – only just make out that they were speaking French. As soon as I entered the building, the sound of it all vanished. Right now, I am sitting in the Council’s press room writing this, and believe me, the only thing to be heard in here is the quiet murmuring of journalists mumbling into their mobile phones or occasionally to eachother, the muffled sound of footsteps against the wall-to-wall carpets, the odd Windows dingohdong, the tapping ticticiticiticticiticiticticiticiticticitici of laptops being typed on, the bababababababa of my hammering on my laptop (I grew up using a typewiter with a ribbon that hadn’t been replaced for years, which is why my computer’s keyboards rarely last for more than 18 months to a year), and the occasional clanging of my coffee cup.

There cold be riots with water cannons going on outside – we wouldn’t notice.

And yet, I can understand how the reasoning has been going. “Let’s not just sit here! We’re gonna go to Brussels, we’re gonna show them how many we are, we’re gonna tell them that they can’t squash US, weeeeee’re gonna let them KNOW!!” And so, a coach is summoned, filled with placards and banners, people and fighting zeal, and off they go. The chanting probably goes on all the way to the Belgian border and perhaps beyond. Off they go, out they go, into the rain and outside they go. They chant to deaf office windows and mute concrete building facades, they break their voices shouting out the slogans that only the surrounding police officers will ever hear, leaning around the fences and against walls as they usualy are, tired of wasting another day watching another pointless manifestation.

Afterwards, perhaps a few drinks or – if they’re lucky – a decent moules-frites meal later, the demonstrators re-enter their rented coach, patting eachother’s backs about actually having DONE something, and may perhaps share a few remaining chants to their mutual edification before snoozing off before crossin the Belgian border again.

Back home, they can enjoy the satisfaction of filing an entry in this year’s annual report of their organisation about having PROTESTED TO THE MINISTERS as one of this year’s accomplishments. A report that might even be read, and perhaps reach its primary objective of edifying their own ranks, before eventually being filed, shelved, and forgotten.

Maybe one day they will actually wake up to the fact that nothing actually came out of it. Maybe not.

Puke

The winter vomiting disease is over us or so I hear from various parts of the Northern Hemisphere. I am not surprised one whit.

After all, how often do you see people washing their hands after using public lavatories? Public, that is, which are usually dirtier than the ones you have at home. And then the current trend is to sell everything without packaging – especialy food, so the same hands which were just performing various bodily duties then go to digging around among naked lettuces, tomatoes or – as was the case with the one elderly gentleman I once saw performing something between swiming movements and archaeological excavations among them – spinach leaves.

When you have dug out your own fruit or veg, where all left bacteria have happily fermented during the days they have stayed in the shop – at room temperature – while being liberally sprayed by sneezing fellow customers, you then place them bagless in your shopping cart, the health benefits of which I have generously elaborated on in this previous blog post (clicking the image to the right will also get you there). Say no more.

And oh yes, I forgot, let’s swing by the burger bar on our way home (after digging around among pocket residue and perhaps left but used Kleenexes for your car keys), and eat some food with our bare hands just in case the bacterial labs you have just stuffed into your grocery bags doesn’t do the trick.

It’s more of a mystery to me that we actually manage to stay as healthy as we do.

Can Your Prime Minister Write? Watch The Web For Proof

The EU has – in an act of breathtaking madness – decided to push through with flying its 27 Heads of Government (accompanied by some Heads of State) to Lisbon on December 13 to sign the Lisbon Treaty, only to fly them all back to Brussels for a summit the day after.

I got the formal press information on the matter by text message (SMS) yesterday, which stated that there will be no press conference, but the entire event can be followed on EuroNews or http://www.eu2007.pt , the Portuguese Presidency’s website.

Too bad we journalists will be unable to attend an informative press conference, then, where the questions would doubtlessly be variations of the legend “How did it feel to hold the pen?” But it is reassuring to know that we will be able to watch live on TV when our respective Prime Ministers sign their names on a piece of paper, probably the first photographic evidence that that they are capable of doing so.

After their ludicrous decision to fly themselves all across the entire continent to put a signature on a document, expectations of their capacities in general are not exactly reaching any summit levels.

A Response To The Economist

The Economist magazine usually provides good reading, but in their latest blog entry about the Belgian crisis, they’ve got it completely wrong.

In the entry http://www.economist.com/blogs/certainideasofeurope/2007/11/belgium_the_model_european.cfm , they argue that the Belgian crisis is not anything to worry about for the EU, since Belgium is only an analogy of the EU, but the EU is not the same thing as Belgium.

They’ve completely missed the whole idea. It is not merely a question of Belgium being an analogy for EU in some sort of symbolic way, as The Economist itself puts it: “because Belgium is a federal state merging different language communities, and hosts lots of EU institutions, it is a model EU in miniature”.

The problem is of a completely different kind. As I have elaborated on in my blog entry http://newtonline.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/belgian-crisis-why-you-should-be-worried/ , it is far, far more than a question of mere symbolism. The problems with Belgium are parallelled point-by-point in the European Union as an institution.

Belgium merged different language communities without asking the people, and the current crisis is in much a question of many of these people wanting a different deal than their ruling elite offered them. That’s your first clue, which The Economist fails to recognise.

The lack of public legitimacy, the lack of public support, the lack of public interest in the state/union on an everyday basis, the democratic deficit in the establishing of the nation/union, the tension between the net payers and the net receivers, the sentiment of groups being marginalised, the endless corruption… all of these are at the heart of the Belgian crisis and all of these lie at the heart of the current EU as well.

This is way beyond Belgium being a miserable souvenir in a EU tourist shop… it is an example of what all the above issues can and will lead to on a European level as well, if they are not dealt with properly. Brushing things off the way The Economist does will only speed up the advent of the problems.

Belgian Crisis: Waiting For White Smoke

“We’re still waiting for the white smoke”, one member of the Swedish delegation laconically remarked to me one late evening some time ago, as we were waiting for a meeting of the European Union’s Agriculture ministers to conclude. The same can be said about the current Belgian crisis right now, for we are all as much awaiting any sign that the conclave has reached a decision in its meetings behind firmly shut doors as those who gather outside the Vatican whenever it is time to elect a new Pope.

The difference is that right now, you could certainly speak about there being two parallel conclaves in Belgium; one currently lying fallow as it awaits the outcome of the other set up by the king. The latter will see its sovereign today, but there is little to indicate that it will have reached any progress. As has happened before, there have been signals that there might be a government in place before the turn of the year, but as I indicated, that is something we have heard before, and we have to see it to believe it.

Meanwhile, the clock ticks on, and it is tempting to start advocating a similar solution as when the Catholic world had been without a Pope for three years; then, the inhabitants of Viterbo, where the conclave was held, locked the cardinals in, served them nothing but bread and water, and took the roof away from over their heads. That resulted in the election of Gregory X in 1271, as well as the decision to keep the cardinals locked in during every papal conclave ever since.

But as for now, the only one locked in is me, for my kids have a day off from school today and my wife came down with the flu this morning, so I am trying to work while keeping things together here at the same time. Hopefully it will be a little different by tomorrow so I can go se what the Brussels meeting of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was all about.

Or at least find time to have a shower.

…Speaking About Singing Ministers

Here’s a lovely gem showing the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt attempting a session in the recording studio as well, circa 1987. (What is it with foreign mnisters and their singing careers?)

If you have problems with the link, use the URL http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nc0_CpiQCdU

It’s in Swedish, but still hilarious – especially when he stops after a few lines saying “There’s something wrong here!”

Watch Foreign Ministers Sing

Germany’s and France’s foreign ministers, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Bernard Kouchner, have joined the artist Muhabett recording a song called “Deutschland”. You can watch a video clip of the two ministers singing at this link: http://www.germany.info/relaunch/politics/new/pol_steinmeier_kouchner_turkish_berlin_11_2007.html

Well… to be honest, I can’t quite discern the gentlemen’s voices, even though I can see their mouths move.

The recording is to encourage young immigrants in Germany to integrate into the country and learn German, as well as for Germans to open up to people from other cultures, we are told.

I am now very eagerly awaiting the logical follow-up: a song titled “France” where messrs Steinmeier and Kouchner sing to encourage Monsieur Kouchner’s countrymen to open up to people from other cultures, and even learn any other language than French.

If one miracle can happen, then so can the other, I like to believe.

Classical Gas

This morning, we are bracing ourselves for an explosion in our nearest Flemish town, Halle, about ten kilometres down the road.

It’s not the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde issue that’s about to take a violent turn, I must add, but a huge gas leak combined with an equally huge water leak, a combination which is potentially explosive, we have been told. I do not doubt the truth in this after hearing Halle’s mayor being interviewed on the radio this morning; his voice was audibly trembling as he announced the emergency plans that had been launched.

Everybody is thinking of the 2004 gas explosion in Ghislenghien (try pronouncing that!), which isn’t all that far from here either, where 24 people died and 132 people were injured, including victims being burned on the parts of their bodies facing the town as they drove by on the motorway passing it with their windows open on what was a hot day already before the blast. I know the exact figures since another of this particular morning’s news stories in Belgium coincidentally happens to be about the ongoing trauma of those who witnessed that event, three and a half years afterwards.

(By the way, we have a gas heater which heats both our home and our hot water. We should have had it inspected long time ago. Oh, bother.)

The thing about both the Halle and the Ghislenghien incidents is that in both cases, the gas pipes leaked after being damaged by excavators. They are building a new apartment block down on the corner of our street… a task that includes the use of excavators.

Oh, bother.

Uncomfortably Numb

Yesterday, I changed a headlight bulb on my car. It took me one hour and included a visit to the car brand’s local garage.

Don’t get me wrong; I pride myself of having some technical skill, especially in the field of cables and connectors, being an ex-radio reporter and all. I have changed more lightbulbs than I can remember on various cars, and have indeed done far more complicated maintenance jobs than that. But it seems that my capacity for do-it-yourself maintenance is coming to an abrupt end as cars are so rapidly becoming so advanced that even simple tasks become a challenge.

Indeed, there are already cars on the market where you literally cannot change a headlight bulb yourself; only the garage has the necessary tools and skills. On my particular car, it is technically possible, but you almost have to detach the battery first, which means that you have to re-program the radio afterwards, and who knows what else. And then its only a 2001. On the newest model of the same car, I was told at the garage which helped me with the embarrassingly simple task, you must lift the battery out first.

It reminds me of a car I had once, where, in order to replace the fan belt, you were required to first lift the whole engine out. No kidding.

On the horizon are cars where the whole engine compartment is sealed, and where you can only reach nozzles for topping up various fluids. But while we let ourselves be lulled into this state of comfortable numbness of having Mr Expert et consortes taking care of all the routine tasks for us, the obvious question arises: What if you need to fix something by the roadside, late at night, in the dark and perhaps cold, while your exhausted and hungry kids are crying inside because we never seem to get to where we’re going? And Mr Expert is closed for the day, the weekend, the week, the holidays, or the season? Or miles and miles away?

I would be less worried if this development was accompanied by a corresponding increase in quality, so that you didn’t have to fix things… but let’s just say that there is somewhat of a discrepancy between the two and leave it at that.

35,000 People Want A Belgium (But What About The Remaining 9.96M?)

There are at least 35,000 people who still think it is a good idea to keep the nation of Belgium as an entity. This became clear on Sunday as they turned up for a large manifestation in Brussels in support of keeping the nation together, in he face of the current Belgian crisis which has threatened to split the country into two nations.

I caught a glimpse of the mood as I drove into town to have a look after Church on Sunday mogning. However, I had lingrered for quite a while after the service, talking with friends, with the result that I arrived just as the whole thing was over. But I did look around to get a general feel of things, and noticed that the feelings were surprisingly calm. Unity was the aim and unity was certainly the result of the event, because it seemed as those participating had been able to leave the squabbling aside and actually meet in a spirit of reconciliation.

There was no shouting, no visible hot-headedness, and the radio report played a clip of the national anthem La Brabançonne sung by the participants in all three of Belgium’s official languages.

By any standards, this is an encouraging sight indeed, because it does provide some hope that whatever the outcome of the current Belgian crisis might be, it will be reached in a peaceful way.

However, 35,000 is not a record for a public manifestation in Brussels. When the “white march” against the authorities’ incompetence in handling the infamous paedophile scandals took place in 1996, the number was 300,000. Thus, one cannot help but wonder what the remaining 9.96 million Belgians who did not take part in yesterday’s event think about the future of their coutry. Do they agree that it should stay united, are they in favour of a split, or do they simply not bother?

Judging from what people usually say when I ask them, the latter is probably the truest answer. Most people are fairly apathetic or indifferent to the ongoing squabbling, and one must remember that any shake-up of the country is percieved far less dramatic here than it would be in, say, the UK, since Belgium has existed for such a relatively short time and has been shifted back and forth between so many different rulers over the preceding centuries.

More interesting is the well-known phenomenon that politicians tend to be more radical in general than those who vote for them. This is true all over the political scale and has been observed by many political scientists, who note that e.g. socialist parties want far more state interference than their voters, centre-right parties want far more deregulaiton and private initiative than their voters, and so on.

Judging from the general mood, Belgium’s French-speaking and Flemish parties seem to be far more zealous to defend the percieved interests of their respective language groups than the people who actualy constitute these language groups, and may reach the point where their efforts to fight for their own may lead to their own abandoning them altogether.

It is always difficult to fight on behalf of other people… because you might discover that they do not want to be fought for.

Belgian Crisis: Tit For Tat

Belgium’s Francophone political parties are retaliating at the decision of their Flemish counterparts recently to overrule them on the issue of the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency (BHV), which threw another spanner in the already stalling attempts to form a new Belgian government.

The French-speakers have vowed not to negotiate the BHV issue as long as the Flemish regional government refuses to endorse three mayors in Flemish-speaking councils, the election of whom was declared invalid by the Flemish authorities because French had been spoken in the preceding debates. The Flemish, in return, claim only to follow the local rules known to all in the communities, where language is such a sensible issue that officially Flemish-speaking communes are required by law only to speak Flemish on all public matters, including relations to the general public.

The appointment of the mayors of the communes of Linkebeek, Wezembeek-Oppem and Kraainem – all close to Brussels and along the border of the nation’s language divide – was effectively overruled by the minister responsible for such matters in the Flemish regional government. Yesterday, he reiterated his standpoint, only to immediately be accused of violating democracy, as the French-speakers point to the fact that the mayors were elected representatives of the people whose decision must be honoured.

The weekend is otherwise expected to be somewhat of a cooling off period, with a manifestation in support of a unified Belgium at one of the country’s biggest national monuments in Brussels on Sunday as the most notable event. However, as mentioned in previous blog posts, the king, Albert II, will expect some progress by next week on the crisis management, and it will be very interesting to see what will happen if no progress has been made by then.

How To Shop Without Money – Legally

Oh, this is rich, literally speaking. Gazet van Antwerpen today publishes the story about Norbert Verswijver, who managed to shop for EUR 48,511 – but only had to pay 60 cents. Legally.

The explanation is that he used a number of discount coupons serially. He brought a bag full of coupons to the Blokker supermarket, all promising 20 percent off this item or 15 percent off that. All fine and dandy, but nobody had thought about that they could be used in sequence.

Norbert Verswijver simply bought any item that had an offer of a percentage discount associated with it – and then pulled out another percentage discount coupon to get a discount on the discounted price he was supposed to pay. And so on, and so on, until the price was down at zero, or anywhere close to it.

Mr Verswijver claims to have read all the fine print and intends to take Blokker to court, if they decide to back off from their offers, as they are currently trying to decide what to do with the customer.

He has already pulled a similar stunt at another supermarket, Match, which offered a EUR 4 discount on deep frozen products to anyone buying four products. Match hadn’t thought about that this would also cover items costing less than a euro a piece, so Mr Verswijver gathered up all the pots of chervil he could find, four of which costing only about three euros, and managed to amass refunded cash to such an extent that he was able to walk away with EUR 6,000 worth of deep-frozen products paid with nothing but paper coupons and one five eurocent coin.

The whole story is found here (in Dutch).

Nukenight

I really like Newsnight on BBC 2. It’s a very competent programme indeed. In fact, you can watch the latest programme here.

However… I didn’t know its journalistic effervescence was of such a dimension that Britain needed to protect its atomic weapons from the show. But judging from this little gem for a headline on the BBC News website shown in this screenshot… it seems that the Ministry of Defence has had reason to lock up its nukes whenever the Newsnight team was in the neighbourhood.

Maybe someone did go ballistic about that thing about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all.

Belgian Crisis: The King Gives Ultimatum

Belgium’s king Albert II has given two of the main parties involved in the current struggle to form a government one week to come up with a proposal that will include suggestions on how to crack the trickiest nut of them all, the queston of the federal versus regional relations.

Herman Van Rompuy (CD&V) and Armand De Decker (MR), who not only come from opposite sides of the language divide but also happen to be the Speakers of the Belgian Parliament’s Chamber of Representatives and Senate respectively, are thus asked to come up with something that almost 160 days of haggling has not. All formal negotiations will remain idle while awaiting the outcome of the two gentlemen’s discussions.

It is not clear, however, what the king will do if they fail.

They, in turn, have already stated that they want to set up a council of heavyweight politicians to solve the relational issues, which would be yet another way of burying the issue under a pile of procrastination: such a council would work for years, and perhaps take up to three governmental terms to reach any conclusions, it is reported today.

The question remains whether or not that will be a workable solution. A similar idea of rallying “wise men” around the same issues was rejected during the last few days by several of the parties involved, and given the heavy pressure from the Flemish politicians on a local level, it is difficult to see how they would be able to wait for so long for an outcome. More importantly, the question remains on how on Earth to hold the next general elections before the question of the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency has been solved.

Mr De Decker believes that there will be a government in place before the end of the year, and the king remains equally optimistic. However, others are less convinced, and in either case, the quesiton is where all this will leave the once designated incumbent Prime Minister Yves Leterme, who is now literally watching from the sidelines how others are doing the job he was appointed to do.

It will be very difficult indeed for Mr Leterme to step up and take the reins of someone else’s negotiated agreement, especially since he appears not to be part of the Van Rompuy-De Decker round at all.

I certainly would not accept the top job on those terms.

Belgian Crisis: Door Slams On Elections

Belgium’s struggling attempts to form a new government lost yet another possible way out today as the new chairman of the country’s Constitution Court slammed the door on any plans to call a new election to break the stalemate.

The political parties in Belgium have been struggling since Election Day on June 10 to form a government that will have a majority in Parliament. However, talks have ran aground over a number of issues concerning the future balance of power between the federal and the regional authorities, brought to focus over the question what to do with the constituency which both includes the mainly French-speaking Brussels and Flemish-speaking towns including Halle and Vilvoorde, which the Flemings have voted to split against the will of their French-speaking counterparts.

The designated Premier-to-be Yves Leterme is increasingly appearing to have failed his mission, and parallel talks hosted by king Albert II are reported tonight as being deadlocked. One of the few options left would therefore be to call a new election that would perhaps shift the Parliament in such a way that a majority would emerge that could form a government.

But that option was slammed shut this afternoon by Marc Bossuyt, the new chairman of the Constitution Court, the same court which ordered the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency to be split three years ago on the grounds that it discriminated against the Flemish-speakers. The federal elections on June 10 were the last that could be held before the question of the “B-H-V” had to be resolved, Mr Bossuyt told VRT, and any elections after that without solving the issue would be unconstitutional.

“New legislation must be worked out that does away with this discrimination”, he told the VRT, though without suggesting any way to do so in practice.

This means that Belgium tonight is stuck dead over an issue which it would need a new election to resolve – but also that it can’t hold such an election unless it resolves that very issue first.

As this Catch 22 sinks in, it is time not only to count the days without a government, but also the days without any negotiations over the formation of a new government: official negotiations have now been shut down for six days. Meanwhile, the country appears to be heading steadily towards what would have been unthinkable a year ago: outright disintegration.

Belgian Crisis: All The King’s Men

Belgium’s king Albert II is muscling his way into the attempts to form a new government in the country, 156 days after the general election was held. While the usual process is for the king only to appoint one person to secure an alliance among parties strong enough to form a government that will have a majority in the new parliament (who usually also becomes Prime minister), and then counter-sign all decisions, the king has now started inviting the fighting sides to outright negotiations at his own table.

People with a more detailed insight into the Belgian constitution will have to decide when and if the king will overstep the line, but it is in any case becoming increasingly clear that he is slowly taking over from the man appointed to the job, Yves Leterme. The picture is compunded by the fact that Mr Leterme has not only failed completely once – before the last few weeks’ total chaos, that is – but also by the fact that Mr Leterme is genuinely impopular as a Prime minister candidate. A majority of the Belgians do not support him in that role, largely because he is so unpopular in the French-speaking Wallonia district, which in turn is much because of his outspoken Flemish interest views.

However, Mr Leterme’s seeming inability to reconcile the different points of view in the current crisis – in much due to his inflexibility on Flemish issues – has led many to start thinking that he is not the right man to unite the vastly diversified Belgium under his leadership for a full government period, either. Now, the king’s inteventions are further undermining Mr Leterme’s position, and Mr Leterme is starting to look like a lame duck.

As for the king’s efforts, though, it seems that even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put the government back together again. Shrouded in secrecy, the strategy appears to have been to form a coalition government including the Socialists, who would otherwise have been left out, and lift the deal-breaking issues from the formation attempts so far (on how to share powers between the different layers of society) into a “council of wise men”. This strategy is looking fairly hopeless at the moment, though, as the Socialists have flatly rejected to step into a government to save their political opponents of the embarrasment of failing to form a government, and the two leading Flemish parties, the “nationalist lite” N-VA and Mr Leterme’s Christian Democrat CD&V, are as reluctant as ever to form a government without the state reform issues on its agenda.

De Standaard today openly claims that the king cannot save the proposed government, either. The question is, then: Who can?

Belgian Crisis: Desperate Attempts

Belgium’s king Albert II has formally asked the Flemish politician Yves Leterme (CD&V) to continue his attempts to form a government, in spite of this week’s complete breakdown in trust between the Flemish and the French-speaking parties that have negotiated unsuccessfully for 152 days to form a government that could find a majority in the Parliament.

The latest talk here is to form an “emergency government”, which will only have social and economic issues on its agenda but steer clear of any of the constitutional issues in which the current crisis in Belgium is rooted. However, the CD&V’s intended Flemish coalition partner, N-VA, has flatly rejected such an idea, and today, CD&V has joined the N-VA line.

N-VA was formed as an attempt to divide the Flemish national vote, which has seen the far-right if not right-extremist Vlaams Belang grow into one of the largest partis in Flanders. The N-VA is well aware that a too soft stance on Flemish nationalist issues will drive many voters back into the arms of Vlaams Belang, which has a very high-profile presence in its part of the country and can be said to be constantly campaigning. Vlaams Belang is openly secessionist and is hoping that the current Belgian crisis will lead to Flanders becoming an independent nation.

One scenario proposed by the De Morgen daily is for the N-VA to support the proposed coalition in Parliament without beng part of the government itself. This has been tried by the Swedish four-party centre-right coalition government of 1991-1994, which was depending on far-right populist party Ny Demokrati for a parliamental majority, a construction which proved instable and next to unworkable as the country’s financial crisis hit full force towards the end of the term.

Meanwhile, all the French political parties – both those involved in government formation talks as well as those who would be left out of the proposed government – will today for the first time invoke the so-called “Alarm bell procedure”, a legal quirk under which one of the country’s ethnic groups can freeze a decision taken by the other against its will. In this way, they hope to stall the implementation of Wednesday’s decision by the Flemish majority in the Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee to overrule the French-speakers and vote through a split of the constituency that encompasses the entire, mainly French-speaking Brussels as well as several Flemish areas including Halle and Vilvoorde.

French-speakers in the Flemish parts of this area fear that they will be unable to vote for French-speaking candidates, should the split go through, while the Flemings insist that the current situation gives the French-speakers disproportional influence. A constitution court has already ruled that the constituency is an anomaly compared to the rest of the country’s election system, and must be broken up, but the French-speaking Walloons have resisted implementing the decision.

Belgian Crisis: Why You Should Be Worried

I write quite a lot about the current crisis in Belgium right now ultimately because it concerns every European, as it might be a foreshadow of things to come in the EU.

After the ethnic and linguistic mud-slinging from French-speakers and Flemings alike has been disregarded, all can unite around one objective fact: Belgium is an artificial geopolitical entity, imposed on its inhabitants from the top down.

It is true that there was enough public support for the idea in 1830 to set up today’s Belgium for there to be an armed uprising against the Netherlands, which the country had been part of for the last fifteen years. But that was largely a revolution in reaction to the Protestant Dutch ruling over the Catholic Belgians, and as religion has become completely marginalised in today’s Western Europe, that is no longer an issue.

Rather, the superpowers of those days found it convenient to have an excuse to put another buffer zone in the middle of what was already – and would become for more than another hundred years – themain battlefield of Europe, one of the most strategic locations. The formation of the new state quickliy became a matter for the ruling elite, both domestic and international, and was thereafter imposed onto the people within its boundaries. There was little or no public say in the process, and even when democracy did catch on, large groups felt marginalised and unable to participate on equal terms.

All of this – all of this – could be written to describe the history of the European Union as well. The formation turning from a great idea into becoming a matter only for a ruling class; the lack of public say, the general apathy before the whole idea instead of healthy patriotism, the endless compromises to make everybody happy that eventually make nobody happy. The allocation of public funds from one end to another, leading to frustration among the payers and apathy and subsidy dependency among the receivers. The endless corruption that bit by bit undermines whatever public support there might have remained, and bit by bit reinforces the image of the state/union as a playground for a faceless nomenclatura, which is irrelevant to the citizens’ everyday lives. And so on, and so on.

In Belgium, this is resulting in anger among many, which should not be taken lightly. However, again, much of today’s Belgian crisis is also seemingly exploited by the political parties, who are probably more at odds with each other than their voters are. This is also fully possible in the EU, where political parties who play on people’s disappointment with what the state/union has done for them – or rather, not done for them – can quickly gain ground, and cause devastation once they have done so.

This should not be brushed off. The multi-faceted Belgium has been hailed as a model for how the EU in all its diversity could function – but its dysfunctions could in equal amount become a sad model for future tensions in Europe as well.

We may not be there yet, but national leaders in the EU member states would be wise to monitor the disintegration of Belgium very, very closely, and ask themselves some seriously tough questions on how to avoid this happening in the EU as a whole. 

Belgian Crisis: French Front Forms

The French-speaking parties have responded to today’s decision where the Flemish overruled them in using their majority in Parliament to vote in favour of splitting the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency. The French-speaking parties have decided to invoke the special procedure in Belgium, under which any of the country’s two ethnic groups that feels discriminated against, can delay a decision by 60 days. This will be used on Friday to stall the implementation of today’s vote.

Thus, a new election to try to break the current stalemate cannot take place during this year.

However, there has been no formal calling off of the governmental formation talks yet, and they may very well continue once the dust has settled and feelings have cooled. Both sides appear tonight almost slightly embarrassed by their respective inflexibility forcing the crisis to reach this level, and there has been some retracting of confrontational rhetoric from both sides during the cause of the day. Especially the French-speaking parties have called on all politicians to take their responsibility in solving the crisis, well aware that that is what most Belgians want them to do, after all.

Belgian Crisis: The Country May Have Died Today

Belgium will be unable to sign the EU’s Reform Treaty on December 13 and may be on the brink of full disintegration as the Flemish parties today went ahead with their previously announced threats and overruled their French-speaking counterparts by voting in favour of a split of the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency.

The French-speaking members of the Committee on Home Affairs, where the vote took plave, almost unanimously rose from their seats and left the building as the vote was announced. Their exit was applauded by members of the far-right Flemish Vlaams Belang party, who gleefuly waved at them as they left.

The country is now in a free fall into full political chaos, as this will likely have been the final nail in the coffin for the current government negotiations. On the 150th day without a government, a new executive seems further away than ever.

It is still unclear, however, what will happen next. Comments have been cautious so far, but in any case, there will now be a legal wrangling over the decision to split the constituency that may very well take a few months, before today’s decision is actually implemented.

The country cannot hold another election before that is done, effectively ruling out the possibility of calling an early election to break the deadlock.

In either case, it is now more likely than ever that the country will not have a government with a mandate to sign binding agreements on December 13, when the EU member states are to sign the Reform Treaty in Lisbon.

Today’s move may well have been the start of the process that will lead to the split of the country, as divisions between the Flemish and the French halves of the country are deeper than ever before. There will also be constitutional difficulties in resolving the crisis.

That’s Some Expensive Ink

No, I’m not talking about InkJet printer stuff – although that’s more precious than gold, but that’s another story – but about the 27 signatures that will be placed on the European Union’s new constitution Reform Treaty on December 13.

The Portuguese, who currently hold the rotating presidency, have finalised the negotiations and have been able to have it branded The Lisbon Treaty. Thus, they want to crown their efforts by having it formally signed in Lisbon as well.

The only problem is that there is supposed to be an ordinary Summit of the EU heads of state and government on that same date – in Brussels. As is customary ever since the EU decided to place all their summits there instead of shifting them around the current presiding nation, a few years ago.

The Portuguese have flatly refused to have the precious Lisbon Treaty signed anywhere else than in Lisbon, even though it’s literally just a question of putting names on pieces of paper. Ok, so are we to move the Summit there, then?

No way, the Belgians have declared. Summits are to be held in Brussels and nowhere else, period.

The solution so far (although no final decision has been taken) is – brace yourselves – that the 27 EU leaders will first fly to Lisbon on December 13 to write their names on a piece of paper. Immediately thereafter, they will all fly to Brussels to resume the rest of the Summit.

No, I am not joking. I do realise that this is hard to believe, so let me link to some other coverage of this outrageous idea, which you can find by clicking here and here.

135 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) is the estimated footprint of these 77,000 kilometres of unnecessary extra travel – just as the EU has decided to reduce CO2 output by 20 per cent. And all, once again, for 27 people to write their names on a piece of paper.

All in the name of national pride.

While you all ponder on why on Earth they can’t just e-mail the final draft around, and tag it electronically, I might add that these precious signatures may be rendered useless, because the Irish, for instance, are still undecided whether or not to vote in favour of it at the subsequent referendum. A few setbacks like that is what killed the previous Constitution, and could very well do so again.

Moreover, the other 26 EU leaders could find themselves turning up in Lisbon between flights only to discover that the 27th can’t sign or maybe isn’t there at all, because there is currently no guarantee that Belgium will have a functioning government by then. In such a case, Belgium will be unable to sign, leaving the other 26 with some unexpected spare time to go shopping in Lisbon or whatever.

And to add insult to injury… they will all be in Lisbon anyway a few days earlier for the EU-Africa summit, but the Portuguese have refused to allow any signing then.

If I am dreaming, then could you please wake me up.

Belgian Crisis: Everybody’s Waiting

Everybody is waiting for today’s make-or-break events in the Belgian crisis as I write this. Some time after 14:30 CET, the Standing Committee on Home Affairs in the Belgian Parliament will vote on splitting the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency, and the Flemish majority in the Committee will mean that the vote will be in favour of a split.

If that happens, the French-speakers will officially leave the attempts to form a new government. Olivier Maingain, leader of the French-speaking FDF party, has publicly said that such a vote would prove that the Flemish leader of the negotiations, Yves Leterme, is not capable of reconciling the parties, a statement which is being seen in press comments as the end to the negotiations.

We shall know more this afternoon.

Belgian Crisis Breaks The Record

The current Belgian crisis today brke anotgher record as it the country has now gone for a longer time than ever before without a government, while haggling over the new executive goes into its 148th day. This week is likely to be make or break, thou, because as I have said previously, negotiators from the Flemish side of the table have given themselves until Wednesday to resolve the most tricky bits. If they fail, they will use the fact that they have enough of a majority to vote for a splitting of the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde constituency, effectively overruling the opposition from the French-speaking Walloon half of the country, a move that is likely to end the attempts to form a new government altogether, and which will leave the Belgians with few other options than to try to call a new election – the validity of which could be challenged on constitutional grounds – or even break up the country.

Meanwhile, support for Belgium as a unified country seems to be increasing, at least in the French-speaking parts, judging from what is visible. Every time you go to a residential area around (French-speaking) Brussels, you see an increasing nu,ber of Belgian flags flown from windows and balconies, a symbol of support for the country staying together. However, you still do not see that in the Flemish areas, a fact that may be a foreshadow of things.

There will also be a rally held in favour of the country’s unity – fittingly in the Jubelpark/Parc du Cinquantenaire, which was originally constructed to celebrate the countrys 50th anniversary of existence in 1880.

But not until the 18th of November. By then, the rally might have taken on the form of a wake instead.

Darkness

I’d forgotten how dark it gets in Sweden this time of the year. The Swedish practice of placing lamps in every window suddenly makes sense, and offers some redemption, but agan, I was reminded of how hard it gets to you to live for such a long time as the winter season is with so little daylight.

However, illumination as an art form is developing steadily; the view of the lighting over the Stockholm Globe arena from the plane as we were approaching the airport was one of the major aesthetical experiences during the whole 36-hour journey, actually.  Indeed, there are still plenty of those cold, ghastly 1970s style plastic boxes with built-in flourescent lamps around, which pass for illuminated signs and which almost killed good old neon some 30 years ago, but hopefully they will eventually become extinct.

Stockholm is also increasingly being cleaned up. Each time you go there, you notice a little something that adds to the general improvement of the total environment. Places are being refurbished, stores are shaping up, and it is now full possible to get a very good meal on the go, compared to when I used to live there in the mid-90s when fast food basically only meant hamburgers or dead-dog style hotdogs. Trendiness has hit the foodservice sector full force, and you can now expect to get a Thai chicken in a paper box from one end of the Central station and round off with a pot of 57-variant coffee and a carrot cake (yum) the size of Virginia at the other, should you need a snack between trains.

(Speaking of food at the Central station in Stockholm by the way, I was overjoyed to notice that the horrible, run-down, neglected and insolent excuse for a restaurant that used to be on the first floor overlooking the main hall – it was commonly known as Hyllan – has finally kicked the sick bucket, fried its last old slipper, passed on, gone to see its accountant, expired, ceased to be, joined the culinary choir invisible as it rests (hopefully) in peace at the scrapheap of catering. It was an ex-restaurant already in the early 1980s, and has been no more for many years before its closure. I should really have celebrated in some way. E-mail me some champagne will you.)

However, the main darkness that hits you is of another kind. It is that of the many poor and – probably – mentally ill that you see digging around in trash cans and rubbish bins looking for something useful; easily identifiable by their ragged appearance. I won’t say that you never see that in Brussels, but maybe the contrast between them and the general cleanliness of Sweden makes them stand out more than they do here.

I’ve seen many seedy areas in Belgium. I could take you to locations which even a rat would shun. I have seen beggars and street kids in the so-called “capital of Europe”. But never do you see so many bin-diggers here as you do in Stockholm.

It’s so sad that a country that prides itself so much about its general welfare can’t be bothered to help these people.

Off To Stockholm

I’m off to Stockholm until Saturday, to learn more about how to investigate major international corporations. (Wish me good luck.) That means that the next blog post from me will be on Monday.

Clock Wise

Great Britain – emphasis, as always, on Great - is an island floating around about half way across the Atlantic. Indeed, if you look realy close, it’s probably not too far from Martha’s Vineyard. At least if you believe some Britons, the kind who seriously believe that Britain should leave the European Union and join the NAFTA.

I was reminded about this wackiness when reading some of the comments to this interesting column by Anatole Kaletsky in today’s The Times:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article2780647.ece

Why should Britain be one hour after the European continent, he asks, when this only leads to unnecessary problems? Companies can’t communicate with each other because they work different hours, especially when it comes to the question of when to have lunch.

At first, it seemed as if he had made a point. After all, a truthful map will reveal the horrible truth that my dear home country is not only that great in size after all, but that it is in fact – oh, perish the thought – more north than west of much of Europe. It is in fact east of Spain, which is one hour ahead.

Bah! sneer the commentators. Why should we adapt to that stupid European Union? Our ties with America are far more important; let’s not make the time difference with the US larger than it is already, they howl, instantly forgetting that the overwhelming majority of Britain’s business is done with other EU countries.

But then, as it dawned on me as I continued to read the comments, why do we mess with this shifting of clocks back and forth at all?

Twice a year, we all engage in this quite ridiculous event of all pretending that it’s A o’clock instead of B o’clock. In order to save daylight time, we are old, only to find ourselves quitting Daylight Saving Time during the part of the year when daylight is at its scarcest.

The question is simple: Why don’t we just change our active hours instead?

It’s such a sign of the arrogance of mankind that our immediate response is to decide to force reality to follow our lifestyles instead of the other way round.

Let the time follow the time zones that the Earth’s rotation dictates, even if it does mean that we have to accept the painful truth that we live across a globe, not a flat map where you could shine daylight on everyone a the same time. If you do need to do business with Seattle or Tokyo, adjust your working hours accordingly. And if you cherish daylight, make the effort of actually rolling out of bed a little earlier in the morning.

And as for the lunch thing, well, like I’ve said before, the real time difference across the EU is not between East and West but between North and South, and no clock-shifting could ever change that.